After creating the base of my new game engine (see last weeks tech blog on procedural generation), it was time to start to bring the game world to life. This meant taking the data I had generated for my dungeon and turning it into instances in a room so that the player actually had something to interact with. So, in this weeks diary, I'll be explaining how I went about this, as well as talking about some of the challenges I faced and the techniques I used for optimising things.

You can do dev blogs on your own sites, and link them on you sig - that's all you need really. There's no need to post them here. We also don't want a 1,000,000 links to blogs that last 1 post and only have 10 words in them.

The ones we post are well planned out, and will have a good word count - making them a good read. We can't ensure than from anyone else.

I'm not going to ruin this thread with a long argument, but I'd like to point out that you can't ensure any sort of quality from the threads in the Alpha and Beta forums either, yet they still exist, and yeah, most threads there are crap. What would having a devlog subforum hurt, exactly? The good threads would rise to the top, while the neglected ones would sink to the bottom. It couldn't be any worse or any less relevant than the junk posted in the current Alpha and Beta forums, and it would have to be better than the crap posted in Off Topic every day, right? I see plenty of devlogs for amazing GameMaker games over on tigsource on a daily basis. The forums there have a more professional image than the GMC, because professionals are allowed and encouraged to show their work there, without being forced to post a demo, risking ruining their first impression with the press and their gaming audience.

I still want to show my game on here, but I don't want to ruin my game's first impression with a half-cooked demo. I'd be more than happy to have my fellow GMCers along for the ride for now, though. My game is as nice as Nocturne's, here. Nobody is going to visit anyone's signature to check out their game, hahah. Ah well. Just my two cents, once again. =(

To be clear... I'm talking about posting in community, or a GM section - you can post what you like in "Off Topic".

That's....true. I'll post a devlog so beautiful it makes you cry, then.

I really think the rules on devlogs are making Game Maker look worse rather than better, though.

Think of it like this:

If we had a devlog subforum, you're almost certainly right in saying that the vast majority of threads there would be crap. But that's true of the Alpha and Beta sections, too. (No offense, everyone.)

When a visitor passing through goes through the Alpha sections, there's a huge chance they're going to find a bunch of really ****ty looking games. That's just a testament to how awesome and user friendly GameMaker is. Sadly, most visitors aren't going to think this way, and are more likely to chalk up the ****ty games to some fault of GameMaker's, unfair as that is.

Now, in a devlog forum, you'll have two kinds of threads. Most of them like you said will be useless, and abandoned in a week by the bored twelve year olds that make them. The good news about these threads is that they're less likely to be actively offensive to people trying to judge how good GameMaker is, because the people making crappy devlogs will mostly just be rambling on about the awesome game they've dreamed up, instead of actually posting their horrible creations for the world to see.

The second kind of devlog you'll find is the kind tigsource is completely full of: hopeful professionals who want to share their game, but aren't comfortable posting a demo yet. Not many people realistically looking to make money with their game are going to post a demo before they send out their press releases, get greenlit, and try their hand at Kickstarter.

Basically, I think the current rules are encouraging unskilled or hobbyist developers to post, and are activingly discouraging people who are looking to make a career with their games from posting here. There are a lot of amazing games made with GameMaker, but you don't see them around here. There's a reason for that.

Cheers!

Sorry for derailing your thread a little, Nocturne. This is my last post here, I promise!

Edit: Also Mike, we don't want to link to dev blogs. We want to start threads for our dev logs. If you've been over to tigsource, you know the general idea.

And Nocturne, this was a pretty fun read, so thanks for posting. It's a shame that only 3 out of 200,000 members are allowed to post these kinds of threads, though. :'D

Interesting read. I actually like the concept of PCG (procedurally generated content) myself, so I'm always reading articles and methods to improve on my own code. It's a bit of a learning process, so I'm glad to see people taking advantage of various ways to make Game Maker: Studio work for them.